Cathy says nothing, not knowing what to offer up. Jesus Christ. It was murder. It was murder, after all. The blood. The delay. Frannie’s faux-straightforwardness, her simplicity: she relied on her own reputation within the family to get away with this. ‘You never said. I asked you so straight-up the other night. And you never said.’

‘Where?’ Joe says.

‘Mum and Dad’s.’

‘Oh, right. Without me.’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Cathy says. ‘Don’t be so petty,’ she adds, even though she knows she would feel exactly as he does: vulnerable.

‘I’ll go now, to the police,’ Frannie says, disentangling herself, her hands up, white palms out. She grabs her handbag.

‘Don’t be dramatic,’ Joe says, his face red. ‘It’s too late. It’s too fucking late. We’d all go down for all sorts. Sit back down.’

Cathy deflates right there as they stand apart, just looking at each other. One of Paul’s paintings from nursery is pinned to the corkboard by the door to Frannie’s kitchen. It looks like Frannie, a tall stick figure with dark hair, his handprint in pink beside it. Cathy sighs, the air leaving her like she is a popped balloon. Joe’s right, of course. Angry but right. That ship has sailed. It is too late.

She was thinking of taking the blame for Frannie only yesterday. On the verge of just doing it, some days, to end the suffering her little sister never deserved, that – Cathy thought – had been thrown over her like a hailstorm, one that Cathy could weather better than Frannie, and with fewer unintended consequences.

‘What the fuck were you thinking?’ Joe says through gritted teeth. Cathy gets that uneasy feeling again, the one she first got in the market, when Joe puffed up like this. Protective Joe. Short-fused Joe. Only his enemy is now Frannie, once his greatest ally.

‘They’re going to find him,’ Frannie cries. ‘I had to tell you before they found him and the injuries weren’t … what I said.’

‘Let’s just – look. Let’s speak tomorrow, about Evan,’ Cathy says. ‘Let’s just go – go away and all sleep on it.’ Something seems to be bubbling away in Joe and she doesn’t like it. She feels it too. Anger. Justifiable anger towards their sister who has misled them. The circumstances are no longer the same, even if the outcome is. Frannie intended it, and now everything is different.

‘No,’ Joe shouts at Cathy.

‘Joe,’ Frannie says tearfully.

‘Fuck this absolute shit,’ Joe says. ‘Nope.’ His square shoulders, bigger than they once were, are now retreating down Frannie’s dark hallway. ‘And fuck you,’ he says to Frannie. He opens the door and the room is blinded, momentarily, by her security light, a rectangle of brightness let in and then shut out again, the room still as dark as it once was, as though no amount of light can be held in here, preserved, to keep the darkness from them.

Cathy arrives home and goes immediately out into her garden. She can’t be confined. She needs to look at the horizon, the fields beneath it, the sky above, and breathe.